Yesterday NASAâ''s Ikhana remotely piloted aircraft took to the skies to help firefighters struggling to contain the many fires burning in southern California. The plane carried a scanning system built by NASAâ''s Ames Research Center, the Autonomous Modular Sensor-Wildfire, which records images in multiple wavelengths, and therefore is not blinded by smoke. The hardware hangs in a 180-kg pod under the aircraft, as visible in the photo below, taken yesterday with smoke from the Lake Arrowhead fire in the background. NASA has been conducting demonstration flights …

The hottest spot in Silicon Valley, these days, appears to be Moffett Field in Mountain View, Calif. First, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin got permission to use the Moffett airstrip for their personal jet, a 767-200. The place couldnâ''t be beat for convenienceâ''Google headquarters is practically across the street. And it is only going to cost them $1.3 million a year, plus an agreement to carry scientific research instruments and fly the occasional scientific mission. (This isnâ''t the first time the jet has gotten the Google boys in the news, you might …

This weekend, firefighters battling the 48,000 acre wildfire just southeast of Silicon Valley, raging since Labor Day, had help from an experimental unmanned aircraft, Ikhana. This was the third time since mid-August that Ikhana took to the skies to help firefighters in California and nearby states. Ikhana, a remotely piloted aircraft manufactured by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems as part of the Predator B series, carries a scanning system built by NASAâ''s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. The system records images in multiple wavelengths, from visible light through the infrared and thermal parts …